Telecommunication networks and other networks are increasing in both size and complexity. It is anticipated that this trend will continue such that very large telecommunication networks (greater than 25,000 nodes) will become commonplace in the not too distant future. Unfortunately, as such networks increase in size, the network management function also increases in complexity. This means that critical tasks such as provisioning (allocating resources to form a communications link), restoration, reinstatement and the like must be completed in a reasonable time using network management tools available to a network manager at a single location.
In a manual provisioning mode, an operator specifies all details of a circuit such as end points, all links, time slots and all network elements. The manual provisioning mode allows the operator to select a particular circuit for routing a communication, such as a telephone call or other communication. However, the manual provisioning mode is slow (the operator must select all links manually) and error prone (the operator may make an error in selecting these links).
In an automatic provisioning mode the operator specifies end points (i.e. start node and end node) and type of circuit needed to provide the desired communication. A network manager system responsively examines all of the spare resources available in the network and selects the optimum path for the requested circuit. This automatic provisioning mode requires the identification of all spare resources such as channels and communication links from a data base, the constructing of a graphical or other depiction of the spare resources within computer memory and the execution of a shortest path algorithm to find the optimum route.
Unfortunately, while the automatic provisioning mode is a dramatic improvement over the manual provisioning mode, the automatic provisioning mode tends to have some drawbacks. Specifically, in an automatic provisioning mode such as presently used in the art, the system loads all available spare resources (i.e., channels) in the network into memory, the details of each of the spare resources being kept in a data base of the network management system. For a network of 25,000 nodes and average connectivity of 10 links per node, 250,000 spares are to be loaded from a data base used by the network manager system. This produces the following shortcomings: (1) large amounts of data must be retrieved from the data base (e.g., 250,000 links); (2) large amounts of data must be stored in the main memory of a computer or work station utilized by the network operator (data associated with the 250,000 links); (3) large amounts of time are required to build a graph of the network in the computer memory; (4) large amounts of time are required to run the shortest path or optimum path algorithm to find the appropriate communications path within the network; (5) the size of the program implementing the automatic provisioning task is relatively large, thereby requiring more powerful computers in terms of both hardware, memory and other parameters which increase system cost; (6) due to the large size of the system required, the network manager and element manager typically need separate computer systems; and (7) the data base in which resource data is stored must be “locked” during the above-described automatic provisioning process, thereby reducing throughput of the network management system (i.e., reducing the number of circuits provisioned per hour by all operators using that system). Due to the above disadvantages, network operators most of the time use manual provisioning modes in spite of the disadvantages with the manual provisioning mode.
It is noted that the above disadvantages of the automatic provisioning mode are exacerbated by increasing the size of the network to be provisioned.